The Necropolitics of Abandonment in Syrian prison camps

Prapti Agarwal

“Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him,” reads Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by 193 United Nations member states. “Everyone”—the citizens of all these states recognized by the UN—are guaranteed the right to a fair trial during criminal conviction or civil dispute. However, a question arises: what about those who have been stripped of their citizenship—the stateless? 

In the United Kingdom, the Home Secretary has been awarded the power to strip a person’s citizenship if it is deemed “conducive to the public good” in the face of terrorist threats against national security, without any requirement of prior trial proceedings. This administrative power has been utilized repeatedly in connection to British citizens trapped in Syrian prison camps—55 of whom have been stripped of their citizenship and rights without fair legal proceedings. Such executive discretion transforms citizenship—a preamble of the social contract—from a constitutional right into a revocable privilege rooted in political expediency. 

The UK is one among 40 countries whose citizens account for 6,000 out of the 25,000 detainees in the Al-Hawl Prison Camp—the largest prison camp in the region for families of IS affiliates. Australia, in February 2026, denied entry to an en route aircraft carrier consisting of 34 of its de-naturalized citizens, all of whom were women and children. A foreign woman in the Al-Roj Camp said, “I’m with my children,” and “Honestly, at night, there’s a lot of raids by the SDF. Sometimes they even hit the women… To be honest, I often fall asleep in fear.” She reportedly wanted to be repatriated but remarked that “our [home country] authorities are not responding… We’ve been begging them to deport us for years.” These are instances of abandonment and a shift in counterterrorism policy: states are externalizing threats rather than adjudicating them. Instead of prosecuting alleged crimes within domestic courts guaranteeing justice and due process, democratic governments rely on de-naturalization, non-repatriation, and indefinite and illegitimate extraterritorial detention of their citizens.

These prison camps resemble the “third spaces” described by Achille Mbembe in Necropolitics. In authoritarian regimes, necropolitics manifests as explicit state-sponsored killing. In liberal democracies, however, it operates more subtly: through the systematized legal categorization of certain groups as disposable or superfluous. The de-naturalization of these

IS-affiliated citizens usurps their right to constitutional process, legitimizes their confinement in these legal gray areas, and reframes the threat as entirely foreign rather than domestically present. 

Mbembe argues that democracy bears within it the colony—a space where perceived threats to sovereignty are contained and violently destroyed. The confinement of the 38,000 individuals estimated to be linked to the Caliphate is paradigmatic of a state's use of such third spaces to isolate and contain danger beyond its territorial and constitutional borders. These fears are not unfounded. The Islamic State regime was responsible for “crimes of unspeakable cruelty… such as mass executions, sexual slavery, rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, torture, mutilation, enlistment and forced recruitment of children, and persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, not to mention the wanton destruction of cultural property… The commission of the crime of genocide is also alleged,” declared an official statement from Fatou Bensouda, former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. 

Yet the existence of grave threats must not nullify the constitutional rights of citizens under the social contract. Liberal democracies must not weaponize the law against some to protect the rest. 

The current counterterrorism strategy of excommunicating threats has produced dire consequences. The prolonged “statelessness” and abandonment faced by Syrian detainees have facilitated radicalization and ideological reinforcement, particularly among children raised as the so-called “cubs” of the Caliphate. Indefinite detention without trial does not contain the threat but exacerbates its risks. Executive de-naturalization without judicial oversight is an undemocratic extension of administrative discretion. When citizenship can be revoked for the “public good,” the social contract is violated, as

public welfare is used to justify the illegitimate upending of individual rights, further fueling

polarization over government overreach and corrupt usage of executive power. 

If democratic states seek fortified national security, a different counterterrorism strategy is required. Fair prosecution and domestic rehabilitation should be chosen over desertion and the revocation of rights. Governments must increase checks and balances, such as mandating independent judicial review and requiring a criminal conviction before de-naturalization is enacted. Domestic prosecution must be prioritized, where legally permissible, through repatriation and trial-in-absentia policies. Implementing such a policy in Syrian camps would achieve the intended objectives of a democratic state: reducing radicalization and the organization of terrorist groups, asserting sovereign power through a fair and just trial process, and dismantling national security threats at their roots. 

Abandonment offers only temporary insulation against the threat as it shifts risk beyond borders. But it normalizes a wholly undemocratic and dangerous precedent: that the state may weaponize the law against some and use it to protect others. A legal system founded upon equality and due process must always uphold those principles above political convenience or economic utilitarianism. Global security cannot, as history has shown, be achieved through exile and must instead be attained through the fair lens of the law.